Kseniya Green

He comes across as such a kind, bright, and truly strong person. He reminds me of the characters from the drama "The Long Night." And it seems the reality of this country is even more terrifying than the drama's tragic plot. The most wonderful and bright people can be destroyed in monstrous ways, and achieving justice is incredibly difficult.

They really did cast the perfect actor for Jiang Yang. Bai Yu makes the character feel strong and yet so heartbreakingly open to the world. It's as if Jiang Yang is breathing in this reality so deeply that when the world becomes suffocating, he suffocates too.
I really think that the hardest thing about acting is to play sincerity. Few actors can play such poignant heart-wrenching sincerity. Bai Yu can.

After The Guardian, I watched The Long Night and became a fan of Bai Yu. He is a great and profound actor. Now I am watching The Wind Blows from Longxi. And one thing I have noticed is that Bai Yu's characters feel very alive, even if they are not expressive or obviously extraordinary. There is always a sense of deep life and inner warmth in them.

I finished watching Guardian or Guardian finished me - that's the question.
In the last episodes, I honestly skipped almost all the scenes except with the main characters, because the level of absurdity went far beyond the permissible norm.
For me, this drama is perhaps the biggest paradox of all that I have watched. Because it is so unbearably bad in many aspects and so extraordinarily good in others.
It's as if the main actors built their own drama among all this madness. And it shouldn't work according to the laws of cinematography, but it did.
And this is both an interesting and a very sad case. Because I understand very well that in a different situation, without all this censorship minefield, Zhu Yilong and Bai Yu could have made a masterpiece - with a normal budget, good direction and a script that wasn't cut and re-stitched into a Frankenstein monster.
So, my sincere thanks to the actors for the emotions, there were a lot of emotions, but now I have an overdose of frustration.

In my opinion, people who say about such dramas "it's just friendship" are either homophobes or blind and unable to perceive cinematic language. The art of cinema is not only about showing, but also, to no lesser extent, about the ability to tell about what is not shown directly.
There are very beautiful hetero love stories, where for some reason a kiss never happens on screen. But that doesn't stop love from being love. The same applies to queer love stories.
But this is also true in the opposite direction. The fact that a kiss or even sex is shown on screen does not automatically make the experience of love between the characters believable.
In The Guardian, the actors managed to convey a deep and intimate love between the characters so that I believe in it even without a kiss. Although I would certainly prefer it if they didn't have to squeeze into the framework of censorship prohibitions.

I'm seven years late to the party, but I'm here now. And I want to say that although the script and direction sometimes feel completely ridiculous, in terms of the main actors and the images they created and the transmission of the love line between the characters, which they subtly convey, this is the best BL adaptation for me of all that I've watched.
In the romantic genre - no matter het or queer - there is often a certain degree of pretentiousness, hypertrophy. I don't want to say that this is bad, it's just a genre style.
But I am very grateful to the actors of The Guardian that they managed to convey something very real and natural in the characters and relationships of their heroes.
Shen Wei and Zhao Yunlan are an absolutely romantic couple, this is felt in the many subtle nuances of their dynamics. And you believe in their feelings, and they get under your skin, even in the setting of a very low-budget production.

This is a completely ugly system in which the health of a talented actor is worth less than a postponed day of filming. I don't understand the agency's actions and, to be honest, I don't understand the actions of the drama crew. After all, even from a pragmatic point of view, the quality of drama inevitably suffers from the fact that the actor feels bad. I understand that this is a problem not only for specific people, but for the system as a whole - often very strict deadlines and conditions for filming. But I really want Hou Minghao to have people next to him who are ready to stand up for him.

I would like to see him in a psychological detective with a strong script. But not as a valiant shining hero and not as an absolute villain, but rather a gray character. With a complex, deep, contradictory personality.
I would also like to see him as a trickster character. Lively, charming and scheming.
In a historical or adventure genre. Maybe as a street performer or treasure hunter.

I wasn't angry, I was just sharing my thoughts. If it sounded like blaming, I honestly didn't mean it. I stood by my opinion, but I don't want to continue arguing about it. We just see things differently. At least we agree on our love for this drama and its characters.

Oh, I remember you! Sorry I didn't recognize you right away, the changed avatar distracted me 😁. Yes, message me if it's more convenient, I'm always happy to chat about drama.
Yes, that's all true. And the fact that when Zhao Yuanzhou gets into a state between the demonic part and its opposite, in a state of half-sleep, he sees Li Lun, who is then replaced by the image of Zhuo Yichen. And this image feels like something intimate and deep about Zhao Yuanzhou's true fears and dreams.
And I wouldn't even call it a bad side. It's just that everything in this world carries a contradiction. As Zhao Yuanzhou's demonic alter ego says, "Humans want to become immortal, but immortals are unmoved by love."
You can "go to a monastery" in the Wilderness and live a peaceful life there in isolation, maintaining stability for a long time. But when you go out into the world and give someone the power to pierce your heart, that makes you truly alive and truly mortal.

I don't rule out that there may be favoritism - including in my case. I really love Zhuo Yichen, I would even watch another season just about him. And of course, because of this, I'm less likely to catch my eye on some of the flaws.
I just think that this is far from the only possible reason for the imbalance of the drama.
And I think it's right to talk about the imbalance. About what was missing or what seemed strange. It's right to critically discuss the final product. To talk about which character, in your opinion, did not receive the proper development and what could have been done differently.
But - in my opinion - making far-reaching assumptions about the motives of directorial decisions is unproductive and only stimulates fan wars. We still don't know all the inner workings, all the circumstances of the creation of the drama - and we never will - in order to judge and condemn.

Yes, they did remove some of the lines between Li Lun and Zhao Yuanzhou that were in the script. For example, the moment from their backstory when Zhao Yuanzhou gives Li Lun his truth eye and says that from now on he will only see Li Lun with his heart. But in my opinion, this is not due to the director's desire to highlight Zhuo Yichen, but due to the fear that the line between Zhao Yuanzhou and Li Lun will look even more gay. Some moments between Zhao Yuanzhou and Zhuo Yichen were also cut for censorship reasons.

Let me say right away that this is my personal impression and everyone may have their own. But for me, the role of all three most significant people in Zhao Yuanzhou's life is well expressed in the episode where Zhao Yuanzhou argues with his alter ego.
Wen Xiao is associated with the image of peace and normality for Zhao Yuanzhou. Regardless of how you interpret their relationship - romantically or platonically - she is the person who gave Zhao Yuanzhou a reason to continue to exist during a very difficult period for him. When he came to look after her and pushed her swing. What is important is that these contacts did not cure his depression, but having a person to take care of clearly helped him to continue to hold on.
Wen Xiao is a sufficient reason for Zhao Yuanzhou to continue to exist. But he only felt truly alive after meeting Zhuo Yichen. But that is the problem. While his love for Wen Xiao is calm and selfless, diametrically opposed to his passionate and greedy demonic side, his love for Zhuo Yichen, like his love for Li Lun before, awakens more turbulent and complex feelings and triggers his demonic side.

I'm not saying that the director's choice is always logical and professional. I myself have many complaints about the director's and script decisions in this drama, despite the fact that I love it. And the insufficient development of the characters' potential is one of these complaints. And subjectively for me, this is not only Zhao Yuanzhou and Wen Xiao, but also Zhuo Yichen too. (People complain that there is too much of him, but on the contrary, I regret that his "breakdown" arc was quickly curtailed. I would have watched a few more episodes of his internal conflict).
I don't want to say that the director is right and that's how it should be. It’s just that I see in these mistakes not favoritism towards the actor, but simply... specific distortions of the director’s thought. Ultimately, the author (who is also the director and scriptwriter) does not aim to show specific actors, but to express his personal idea. And I have a feeling that this particular director is inclined to get overly carried away by his idea to the detriment of the balance of the work and sometimes the logic of the plot.

But I guess that's the point of the drama . It's not just an adventure story about beings with super powers, it's a story about what it is to be alive. And that being alive means being mortal. So the whole Zhao Yuanzhou arc makes perfect sense to me.

Let's see how it goes, but so far I don't see any favoritism in this. The director has the right to shoot the drama they want and the drama is not obliged to fit into the template structure of ml fl main characters - and everyone else in the shadows. The director even has the right to play with the expectations of the viewer and make the real main character not the one the viewer thinks about at the beginning.
The role of Tan Jiarui is significant not because he is a favorite. But because the director saw in him an actor suitable for the role of characters significant for the director. This is normal. There are famous directors who shot the same actor in almost all of their projects.
People may not like this choice, that is their right. But this is not favoritism, it is simply a mismatch in perception with the director.

I don't think it's fair to blame the girl. Her character had a lot of potential and the actress is charming. I just think they really wanted to make a BL drama but couldn't afford it because of censorship. So they had to balance the need to pass censorship with the desire to keep the male relationship as the central one. It's not just chemistry that just happened. Their relationship is both written and filmed as the main one in the drama. It's bl romance in it's essence . Which I personally like. What upsets me is that the heroine's story suffered greatly because of it. There are dramas that manage to make queer code between men without making the fl weak, but it's not easy.

It's like the drama is constantly split into the "official" one and the "between the lines" one. So viewers can watch different dramas depending on their preferences. But they definitely put this double meaning on purpose. Every time there's a moment of sorts of flirting with FL in the drama, there's always a second ML and the scene is structured in a way that allows for different interpretations of who's actually flirting with whom. But here's what's remarkable - all the key scenes happen between the MLs. If they wanted, they could have easily made the het romance much more powerful and the drama's ratings would have been higher by simply replacing Zhuo Yichen with Wen Xiao in some of the key scenes. But they didn't. And I think I know why.

I completely agree. Unfortunately, we can only guess what this drama would have been like if there had been no queerphobic censorship and they could have filmed everything exactly as they wanted. But in my personal opinion, they clearly wanted to make a queer romance - and they wrote it between the lines as clearly as possible in this reality. And these are not just specific scenes. The entire arc of Zhuo Yichen and Zhao Yuanzhou's relationship is built as a romance from the beginning to the epilogue. Like... if there had been a girl in the place of one of them, none of the viewers would have even doubted that this is romance, with all the same scenes.

I assume they are in a genuine polyamorous relationship. Maybe some parts of this love polygon are platonic - each viewer decides for themselves which ones. But I think Wen Xiao saw what was going on between these two even before they did. Remember "It's you who is standing between us two, shameless guy"